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CyclopsWasRight wrote:Why does everyone hate Johns? I get why people hate Bendis, like the Bendisspeak and horrible decompression, but what are Johns things that he's notorious for?

Well, I can't speak for other people and I certainly don't hate him, as a person. I actually liked his writing early on in the new JL series (1-5, specifically -- after that it started to fall apart, even at the end of the first story arc). I also have not read Aquaman (I'll confess that I have always despised the character), so I can only speak to Johns in relation to JL, JLA, and this Forever Evil business.

But I think recently, the biggest problem I have with him is that his stories are too melodramatic. He has too many contrived plot points that violate standard common-sense rules of cause-and-effect, and his Trinity War stuff is so extreme in this regard that I actually laughed my way through issue 23 of JL. And not because this was some Giffen/DeMatties JLI story that was meant to be funny. But just because the individual scenes were so disconnected, and had so little to do with each other, and were so clearly just thrown together for shock value, that I couldn't take the thing seriously.

And if you look back on the whole JLA run so far (1-7), and all of JL since at least the start of Throne of Atlantis, that's what it's all been. Every scene, every page, is just done for shock value rather than to be a good story. It's like he knows Reis can draw these amazing, shocking, mind-blowing double-page spreads, so he tries to write as many of them into the story as possible, rather than having them flow logically out of the cause-and-effect progression that would normally happen. (Any good writer can provide the artist with TONS of material worthy of a 2-page spread without having to aim for it on purpose.)

Perhaps related to this, there is Johns' over-reliance on over-the-top events inside the story, rather than concentrating on character conflict to drive the plot. This makes JL such a wasted opportunity. Here he has put together some of the strongest characters (personality-wise) in the entire DCU, and rather than having their character interactions drive the story, everything is completely externalized. These god-like characters with all these powers, and with supposedly heroic motivations, spend an awful lot of time letting events control them, rather than doing the controlling. A character like Wonder Woman should be driving the action of the story, not a victim of it.

Then there is the comment someone made above, that for the world's "greatest heroes' they don't act very heroic. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

As others have mention, I don't dislike Geoff Johns' as such. What I dislike is the sheer amount of power he has. He (and to a far lesser extent Scott Snyder) gets to pretty much decide the direction of an entire line of comics. When the reboot happened after Flashpoint (which he wrote centered around a character that he had been pushing to bring back for who knows how long), none of his Green Lantern stuff got rebooted, presumably because it was still selling super-well.

Flynn the Pirate wrote:As others have mention, I don't dislike Geoff Johns' as such. What I dislike is the sheer amount of power he has. He (and to a far lesser extent Scott Snyder) gets to pretty much decide the direction of an entire line of comics. When the reboot happened after Flashpoint (which he wrote centered around a character that he had been pushing to bring back for who knows how long), none of his Green Lantern stuff got rebooted, presumably because it was still selling super-well.

It's specifically his job to decide that direction as Chief Creative Officer. I'm not sure I like that position in general, or that it's in any way necessary. I think it was created just as a way to give Joe Quesada a promotion.

CyclopsWasRight wrote:Why does everyone hate Johns? I get why people hate Bendis, like the Bendisspeak and horrible decompression, but what are Johns things that he's notorious for?

mrorangesoda wrote:An obsession with continuity (did we need a reason Barry Allen wears a bow tie?) and childhood trauma, dull characterization (read Young Justice alongside his Teen Titans), and his love of gore used to be the main criticisms of his writing.

Well, the continuity thing may not be a big deal these days... but he used continuity well back when he was on JSA.

S.F. Jude Terror wrote:It's specifically his job to decide that direction as Chief Creative Officer. I'm not sure I like that position in general, or that it's in any way necessary. I think it was created just as a way to give Joe Quesada a promotion.

Yeah, that's something new. In the past there was no such thing as Chief Creative Officer.

I can't say I dislike John as he's more tolerable than Didio and Harras but my opinion soured on him once he partook in the Flashpoint and New 52 debacles. If he been kept on the GL books primarily that would have been preferable from my point of view.